Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his primetime address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.
Maybe he’d have been better off not trying.

The most momentous launch since the Apollo era was about to begin, and along Florida’s space coast, a secondhand exhilaration was working its way through the assembled crowd, as though all of us, and not just the astronauts, would soon ride out of Earth’s gravity well on a pillar of fire. The space faithful had started arriving at the A. Max Brewer Bridge in Titusville before dawn, under the light of a full, yellow moon.

As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments today about birthright citizenship, Donald Trump was watching from the courtroom—an apparent first for a sitting president. He listened silently as the justices pelted skeptical questions at Solicitor General John Sauer, who tried to defend a Trump executive order purporting to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of certain immigrants.

For a brief moment last week, Congress started to do something productive. The Senate, after weeks of bickering and fruitless negotiations, unanimously approved legislation to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, taking a small but meaningful step toward resolving one of the many crises that have sprung up like targets in a game of whack-a-mole during President Trump’s second term.

Tracy Kidder, who died last week at the age of 80, was a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and a writer of articles and books that served for many readers as timeless exemplars of what nonfiction writing could be. A headline announcing his death—Kidder, it said, “turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers”—had it right but also had it wrong. A number of Kidder’s books, such as The Soul of a New Machine and Mountains Beyond Mountains, did indeed become best sellers.